Almost 2,000 years ago physicians first wrote of diabetes, describing it as a disease causing frequently and in great quantity and to have a great thirst. These early physicians watched helplessly as their patients consumed enormous volumes of fluids that seemed to pour through them unstopped, became progressively more ill and emaciated and finally died.
The disease causing this wretched condition they named diabetes, which means “to run through like a siphon”. It took 1,600 years before physicians realized that along with vast quantities of body fluids their diabetic patients were losing sugar in their urine and it was “wonderfully sweet, as if imbued with honey or sugar. He added to the name the Latin term mellitus meaning “sweetened with honey”.
By naming diseases by their signs and symptom, early physicians often created confusion, leading to misspent effort by those who followed Diabetes is a case in point. Today, diabetes is divided into two separate and distinct diseases – type I and type II diabetes with two different pathological causes but essentially the same symptoms.
Sixty or seventy years ago, however, physicians believed that all diabetes was the same, there was just a different in severity. Some people got it in childhood or early adulthood, suffered a progressively rapid course, were unresponsive to treatment and died within a few years. Others developed it much later, had much less severe cases and could be “cured” or at least treated fairly successfully by diet.
Both group of patients produce large amounts of sweet urine and so were diagnosed as having diabetes mellitus. Physicians now recognise that although, both disorders are called diabetes, the circumstances and pathology leading to their development are entirely different. Type I diabetes, the more rapidly serious of the two, usually develops in childhood or adolescence when a virus or other toxic substance destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and requires aggressive treatment with insulin in shot form.
Studies show that, it is a disease of insulin lack. In contrast, type II diabetes develops later in life can usually be treated with diet and or oral medicines and is a disease of insulin excess. It is strange that the same disease can be caused by both an excess and an insufficiency of insulin, but that is precisely the case.
Although, the dietary plan is in most cases the ideal nutritional regimen for optimal health in those with type I diabetes, it is not the total treatment. Since their damaged pancreases can produce no or at best very little, insulin.
A quick look at type I diabetes will dispel this not ion in a hurry. Type I diabetes is a disorder of insufficient insulin and unrest-rained glucagon excess and as such it serves to clarify the importance of a regulated balance between insulin and glucagon.
Type I Diabetes: Glucagon Run Amok
In type I diabetics, with no insulin to hold it back and only glucagons to stimulate its release, fat pours out of the fat cells into the blood. For the same reason any incoming dietary fat can’t get into the fat cells and so joins with the fat rushing from the fat cells and heads toward the tissues for disposal. As this blood, laden with fat, courses through the liver, the fatty acids enter the liver cells and then without insulin to stop them, easily enter the mitochondria for breakdown.
In contrast to other cells, liver mitochondria process fatty acids differently in that they don’t burn the fatty acids for energy but instead partially break them down into molecules called ketone bodies produced in the liver cells travel through the blood to the muscle and other tissues that burn them for energy.
In type I diabetics, however, the enormous quantities of ketone bodies generated by the massive fat flux far exceed the needs of the tissues and outstrip the body’s capacity to jettison them via the urine, the stool and breath.
As the ketone bodies, which are acids, accumulate in the blood, the blood be comes more and more acidic until the victim is in the throes of a metabolic nightmare called diabetic ketoacidosis, which leads to coma, then death if not treated quickly.
This reverse flow of fat makes it impossible for a person without insulin to gain weight. Indeed first symptoms of a person with undiagnosed type I diabetes usually experiences is an unexplained weight loss in the face of constant hunger and greater-than-normal food intake, its not unusual for such a person to lose 30 or 40 kilogram in a month or two.
Type II Diabetes: The slow Road. Type II diabetes represents approximately 70 percent of all cases of diabetes and although, less immediately sinister than its type I counterpart, it is every bit as deadly over the long run. Like heart disease, high blood pressure doesn’t develop overnight but requires years of underlying metabolic disturbance before the symptoms become apparent.
As a result, since most cases of type II diabetes surface during middle age, the disorder is often referred to as adult onset diabetes. The development and diagnosis of the type II variety usually follows a weight gain, a fact easily explained by the difference in insulin dynamics between the two disorders.
In both cases blood sugar is elevated but for different reasons. The blood sugar level rises in type I because the cells have become so resistant to the effects of insulin that even large amounts can’t adequately move the sugar out of the blood and into the cells. In type II diabetes there may exist the paradoxical situation in which both insulin and blood sugar are elevated, at least, for a while.
In the early stage, insulin is always elevated, atleast, but as disease progresses, insulin levels often decrease as the pancreatic beta cells (the cells that produce the insulin) fatigue or wear out from constantly producing insulin at prodigious rates under the stimulation of the increasing blood sugar.
During the early stages, which can last for years, the constantly elevated insulin levels give rise to high blood pressure, hear disease, elevated cholesterol and obesity – all diabetes with great frequency.
During the later stages of the disease, the elevated blood sugar damages the kidneys, eyes, blood vessels and nerves in the same way it does in type I diabetes.
Type II diabetes is without doubt of genetic origin, if your parents have or had it, then the adds are high that you will inherit the predisposition to the disease. If you follow the proper diet, you can ward off the onset of type II diabetes or even reverse its damaging effects. Conversely, hasten the development and worsen the severity.
